I agonized and I didn't get anywhere, and then I had a baby and I was like all none of the things I was reading, which is why What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting you know, so satisfying because I hated What You Can Expect When You're Expecting.
It was the worst book ever.
It answered no questions for me whatsoever.
None of it addressed what I wanted to know.
And so it was like an insult on top of everything else, right? I'm sorry.
I apologize preemptively to everyone who found that book a wonderful book. It wasn't for me.
Alice talked about in the article how there was this moment when like I was you know, like starting to go into labor and it was like, "Oh my god, this enormous thing has to come out of me.
How's that going to happen?"
Like I knew theoretically that that was going to happen, but it's presented to you in a very personal way and a very intimate way when you go into labor.
And I just discovered the reality of it in a special way. Yeah.
So, what I'm trying to say is that I I want my work to sort of help people realize that this kind of agonizing is actually completely reasonable because there isn't any easy answer and we don't have a framework.
And when there's something kind of almost inconceivable that's happening then it's a bit like as I said earlier, like you step off the ledge into the deep and flailing might be the only response.
[Music] So, I am very interested in someone by the name of Quentin Smith and the role that he played in your life.
How did that connection happen and what was the result of that connection?
So, I was at Antioch College.
I had gotten my undergraduate degree, I think, or I was close to finishing.
I can't quite remember exactly when I met him.
But I was already thinking I wanted to study philosophy, but wasn't sure how to go about it because I don't have an undergraduate degree in philosophy.
In fact, I tried twice to take philosophy classes and each time it was a huge disaster and I I realized about three or four weeks into the class this wasn't working for me. So, I dropped out.
I never managed to take a single philosophy class when I was in college and yet, don't ask me to explain this. I have no idea.
I was convinced that philosophy was probably the thing that would be most meaningful for me to study and explore.
I don't know what to tell you about that other than I'm can be a reasonably stubborn individual in various ways as my husband will be happy to elaborate on.
Okay, so I thought I really want to study philosophy.
I don't know how to do this or what the best way is and there are lots of different kinds of philosophy I'll just add so, you know, you can do kind of Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy.
These are rough categories, you know, where so like Eastern might be in my city Buddhism or related sorts of kind of faith-based philosophical views.
And then within Western style philosophy there are like so there's Continental philosophy and analytic style philosophy, which is what I do.
Anyway, so I didn't I didn't know I didn't didn't even have a grasp of these distinctions, but I was committed. Okay.
So, I was needed to earn some money because you know, I'd graduated and I was just sort of living hanging out with friends trying to figure out what my next step would be and so I worked for the college driving back and forth to the airport to pick up invited speakers and Quentin Smith was an invited speaker.
So, I drive to the airport and I pick him up.
I don't think I I don't think I knew anything about him.
It wasn't like I thought, "Oh, a philosopher.
I want to meet this person."
It's just some random invitation. Pick up, right?
Yeah, some random pick up, you're right.
I picked him up and he gets in the car and we start talking and it's a long drive.
I think it was like I don't remember where we I think he came in to like Cincinnati.
So, we had like an like an hour and a half.
And he asked me about myself and I asked him about him and he I discovered he's a philosopher and then we started talking and I said, "I always I really would love philosophy and I really want to do it, but I don't really know how and I don't know if the things I'm interested in are really philosophical."
And he said, "Well, tell me about it."
And I said, "Well, I really care about like how we like how to understand who we are in the world and I think a lot about time and I'm trying to kind of make sense of what it's like to have a kind of a point of view."
And so I started just blabbing, you know, basically as I'm I don't know how old I was, like 22 or something.
And he said as we're driving, he's like, "You should study philosophy.
You're exactly the kind of person who'd be interested in doing philosophy."
And I said, "Well, what should I study?"
He said, "Well, you should read Martin Heidegger's Being and Time to start because that's all about the nature of the self and time." And I said, "Okay."
And then we kept going and we kept talking and I said, "Okay, I'm going to read this book."
And then he said then he said, "Well, I think you should read the book."
And then he said, "And I think you also should study with me."
This is actually like an hour cuz I told him I studied chemistry and I really loved problem solving and so I loved organic chemistry and that's what I was really into when I was when I was in college and and I was good at it. Like it was my thing.
I could have become a chemist.
I also drove him back from his talk. I thought, "Okay, wow."
So, he goes off to have his visit and and I immediately go to the library, dig out Being and Time and start reading it and I was like, "This is fantastic.
Confusing, but really interesting."
So, then I drive him back and I keep I tell him what I've gotten out of like the first I don't know if like 10 pages I'd written. It's very dense.
It's like, you know, it took me forever to read it, but I managed to get through 10 pages and he said, "You should study with me. Here are my details. Let's figure this out."
And so that was how it started.
I didn't know anything about him, but he was so great to talk to and so responsive and he understood he understood the intellectual problems that I wanted to explore because he explores those intellectual problems and I had never met anybody who had any understanding of this weird orientation that I had. Mhm.
I could tell you more, but that's how it happened.
It was like completely random.
I'm going to come back to Quentin Smith, but I want to call back to something that you said a few minutes ago, which was you took some philosophy classes I'm paraphrasing here and they were disasters.
Why were those classes disasters? What didn't work? Nothing worked. I mean, okay.
So, there were a combination of things and some of it was me and some of it was certainly the teachers.
So, and also some of it was analytic philosophy can be extremely inaccessible. Okay?
It's a beautiful way of thinking and it involves a very rigorous concepts-oriented approach to thinking about almost anything that you want to pick out in in the world around us or how we think and how we make sense of the world.
But it's not very accessible in the sense that it doesn't feel very natural.
And so the first thing was I was both immature, very impressed with myself in the sense of like, "Oh, I'll just do this, you know.
I can you know, I do mathematics. I do chemistry. I do physics.
So, why of course I can do this."
And I think I underestimated things, but also the teaching wasn't I'm just going to be the teaching wasn't very good.
I put myself through college and I started at a big state school and the class was huge and the professor wasn't really into the teaching and I had some TA.
And so, you know, she would stand down there.
It was this huge like there must have been 300 students in the lecture hall and she was standing down on this on this blackboard and scribble things on the blackboard and I could barely see it and and I didn't understand really what she was doing.
I would do the readings and work really hard to try to understand the readings.
The TA wasn't especially into his job either.
And then there was the first assignment.
I worked incredibly hard on it.
Incredibly hard and I had taken other classes like writing classes and stuff like that and the TA hated it and I was so angry that I just dropped the class.
Like, you know, this is you know, I was like, "I'm sorry, but this is bullshit." So, I dropped the class. That was the first time.
And part of it was like the class wasn't really designed it was like designed oh, these are the things you should know if you are going to think about philosophy.
It's like a 101 and she started out with some history, but it just wasn't it would no one seemed to really care about like how to take these abstract ideas and connect them to things that were meaningful in a certain way.
Like I care very much about the nature of how we live our lives, the kinds of struggles that individual people have.
I'm fascinated by the fact that all of us have these internal worlds and then there's some way in which we all have these internal worlds and then these internal worlds have to kind of coexist with the external world and we have to try to make sense of everything and you know, in and try to understand other people.
These are like deep puzzles for me and it's not that analytic philosophy doesn't address this, but it doesn't address it in a straightforward way.
And so I didn't understand why I was supposed to work through some abstract kind of, you know, it was actually Descartes that really like she started with and that Descartes talks about the mind-body problem, but she didn't like make any connection to like these sorts of questions.
It was just like oh, the mind is different from the body and here are these questions and here's an analysis of what what, you know, what Descartes was saying and what the problem was.
And so it wasn't a good experience.
And then the second time I took a more applied class and this was a philosophy of law class and this also didn't go well.
There's another thing, which is that I may have mentioned I was a stubborn person.
Well, I have views and I was committed to trying to kind of argue something that was kind of creative also with the first paper actually.
I wanted to kind of give my own perspective and I'm sure that it was raw and not especially good in various ways, but it wasn't stupid. Do you know what I mean?
And I would got treated as though I was making a mistake by trying to kind of, you know, really engage in a very kind of open and creative way.
As opposed to just kind of vomit back what I was being told. Okay.
I'm not going to mention the schools I was at.
They weren't like maybe I mean, I put myself through school.
I had to kind of apply I didn't you know, so it was a mix of things that made it go badly and I blame can be spread all around.
Anyway, that's what happened. All right.
Thank you for answering that.
Part of the reason I want to ask this is that many people listening will not know how philosophy applies to their lives or Right.
they have had similar experiences.
They take a philosophy class and it's an hour and a half of trying to define what is is and they're like, "I don't know how this is relevant to my life. I'm out."
I would like to think of myself as a curious person, but I've had these experiences where it's like, "Okay, I'm interested in like the limits of our language and the limits of our world.
Let me get into Wittgenstein."
And I'm like, "Wow, cool family, but I cannot decipher this guy Yeah.
any which way from Sunday."
And then I've had a few experiences though that have brought things home.
I won't make this into a soliloquy, but I remember taking a freshman class when I was undergrad at Princeton with Gideon Rosen.
And I believe it was introduction to epistemology, something like that, which in and of itself as a course title none of us knew how to make any sense of, but he was so good at weaving stories Mhm.
together with the concepts that it was very compelling and very, very memorable to the extent that here I am whatever it is, 25 plus years later and I still remember the impact of that class.
And I just want to give credit where credit is due to a lovely Austrian woman who's now at HBS, Harvard Business School, who gave me a copy of your book, Transformative Experience.
And that was my my personal experience of reading some of the examples in that, which we'll get to.
Whether it be the cochlear implants or some of the other thought experiments that we will certainly get into.
I was like, "Okay, I can connect this to some real or hypothetical lived experience that I've had or might have, right?" Mhm.
And that made at least all the difference for me.
So, I wanted to learn about the early failures because a lot of people listening are going to go, "Oh god, conversation with a philosopher.
This is going to turn into a bunch of intellectual masturbation and I'm not going to know what to do with it." Mhm. So, anyway. No, completely legit.
Yes, you'll discover that the sentence snow is white is true if and only if snow is white.
I mean, you know, come on.
I mean, that's actually very important, but no.
As a matter of I'm just going to give you a bit of background.
Like, so I went to Princeton for my PhD.
Amazingly, they let me in as this crazy person, okay?
And then we can talk about that, but they let me in.
And I was a TA or teaching fellow for Gideon for that class. Oh, no kidding. Wow, small world. Yeah, exactly.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Gideon is an amazing teacher.
He's He's an excellent really He was He's actually like one of the best people to talk to to get a sense of an idea and get it framed.
And you can just see immediately like what the main idea is, why it's important, and you know, what what the problems are as well, right? Unbelievable teacher.
I mean, the lectures were unreal.
So, just unbelievably good. Totally fantastic.
And so, I think the teaching does really matter and you know, very few people are lucky enough to be introduced to philosophy by Gideon.
But I think it's also the case, independently of teaching ability or teaching focus, that yeah, analytic philosophy, there's a sense in which well, it's not unfair to call it a kind of intellectual masturbation in certain contexts or it can seem like that or it can descend into that.
I'm not going to deny it at all. And I'm not Mhm.
going to deny that I might also kind of fall into that in various kinds of contexts when I'm hanging out with the right sorts of people.
But I mean, masturbation is not always a bad thing. Exactly.
IT CAN BE VERY REWARDING. OKAY.
I do think that because in a quest for kind of clarity and precision, sometimes if that's the priority and I respect that as as as a priority, it can be easy to leave other things aside.
But my approach is different.
I do technical work on causation.
I do collaborative work with with computational cognitive scientists.
Like, there's plenty of stuff that's maybe a little bit less accessible than the transformative experience work.
But with there, because with that book and with the work I've been doing subsequently, I was returning to my roots.
Like, I wanted to approach the topics that made me go into philosophy and that I find deeply meaningful.
And I thought, "Well, I have to pair the search for rigor with with [Laughter] a way of developing the ideas that would capture the content in an intuitive way.
And partly it's because when you're trying to do something new, and I am trying to do something you have to be guided by a kind of gut instinct and understanding that it's right.
Because I think if you haven't got that gut instinct, it's really easy to lose track of things.
So, so the thought is, "Well, if I'm going to do this, approach this topic, I have to approach it in a way that kind of follows like that I deeply intuitively grasp and that I especially when I'm confused, I can kind of reach back to that."
And if it's really right, I should be able to explain it to somebody without a technical apparatus.
But then I should also be able to embed it in that technical apparatus and use that to draw out the consequences in an especially precise and interesting and rewarding way and then take it back to the intuition.
And that is what I have tried to do.
I'm happy with my results.
I'm not going to claim, you know, I don't I can't I'm not going to like, you know, promote myself, but I think that's been my goal.
That is my goal and it's incredibly hard.
I mean, you are on podcast. Well, that's true.
I guess that's what people do.
But it's incredibly hard to do that try to capture these ideas.
So, that's the take and I think I've been like so happy because people have people seem to get it.
Like, it seems to be It resonates. Yeah, it resonates.
And I looked at some of my philosophical heroes, which would be Thomas Nagel and Saul Kripke, because these are people in the field who have really managed to develop things.
And also, like, never mind my early failure to appreciate Descartes.
Later on, like, Descartes and Hume, all of these philosophers, there's a way to understand their work using very simple examples that brings out the heart of it.
Actually, Gideon was really good at that.
Like, teaching Hume, for example.
He just really could bring that out.
So, I was like, "Okay, this is what I can do.
This is what I'm going to do.
Or at least I'm going to try."
So, I promised I would come back to Quenten and I feel like this is a decent enough place as any to try to figure out how you have landed where you are and also how you think about different decisions.
So, I'm going to read something from the New Yorker profile.
And then I want to unpack it a little bit.
So, this won't take too, too long. It's just a few lines.
Smith suggested that Paul read widely and reach out to philosophers whose work intrigued her.
Perhaps, he said, they would agree to correspond with her for a modest sum.
A letter writing campaign resulted in a sort of pedagogical supervision by mail with three of them.
Paul offered to each a $250 personal check and asked if they would reply to letters about her work as well as comment comment on a paper of her own.
They agreed to correspond with her.
She now suspects, quote, not quite knowing what they were signing up for, end quote.
Every 2 weeks for many months, Paul mailed at least 20 typewritten pages to each philosopher attempting to dissect their arguments one by one.
They responded to all of your letters.
And and by the end of the experiment, you felt more sure of yourself.
Obviously, I'm paraphrasing the last few lines.
There's so much here in this paragraph.
I'll throw these out and then you can answer them in any particular order you like.
One is, did they actually take your check or did you make the offer and then they not not take the check, but correspond with you?
The second is, how did you choose the people you wrote you reached out to?
What drove the selection?
I offered to pay them and they all said yes, and then at the end I said, "Okay, I'm going to send you the check."
And only one person took it.
And I don't want to out that person. Yeah, of course.
Because that person was also very supportive to me in my later career and they earned their $250.
It's also a deal is a deal.
Like, there's nothing wrong with that.
Yeah, I had no problem with it.
I was surprised that the other two didn't.
Like, their per hour labor on that one was probably yeah. Exactly.
I mean, and I took out student loans to do all this and I had earmarked that money. It was all fine. Yeah, yeah. I didn't object.
I paid Antioch College much more or Antioch University at the time much more than that amount simply for the privilege of like you know, that degree was like I just basically I paid them money so that it it was official, but the people who really did the work didn't make, you know, anything.
How did you choose those particular people to write to?
And how many how many did you write to you get the three to actually bite? Oh, everybody said yes. Everybody said yes? Yeah.
So, I have a science background.
I was very interested in the nature of time and I had been working with Quenten on the philosophy of time.
So, Quenten is primarily was was was a very unusual philosopher in terms of his training and his his intellectual discipline and what he he worked on a variety of things.
He didn't He definitely did not fit into the mainstream philosophy.
And that was actually great for me because I didn't fit in either and he was open to that and he helped me.
And then I got to Princeton.
There's definitely something to say there. So, I talked to Quenten.
I needed some kind of degree in philosophy and some kind of paper to apply to PhD programs.
So, the thought was Antioch College had this basically a degree by a where you could get an individualized master's of master of arts.
You pay the the university some enormous amount.
It wasn't that much, but it seemed a lot like seemed like a lot to me.
And then you had to kind of do your own thing.
And as long as you did your own thing, you would get this master's degree. Okay.
So I was like, "Okay, sign me up."
Pretty sweet business model, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, there were a few other things like a professor had to sign off or whatever, but Quentin signed off on everything.
So he said, "Well, okay, you want to do some equ- course equivalents?
Why don't you do something philosophy of time? I have this friend.
He's you know, he does philosophy of time. He'd work with you. He'd be great." And I said, "Great."
So that was straightforward.
And then I said, "Well, how about I want to choose some female philosophers cuz there's hardly any.
I'd like to work with some women."
And so I I went to the bookstore and looked at the philosophy section and I found two books, recent books by female philosophers, one in philosophy of mind and one in philosophy of science.
And I said, "What about these two?"
And he said, "Okay, great. Write to them."
And I wrote to another person as well who did logic and I was going to work with her as well, but I did not have the background. It became clear.
She's a very sophisticated logician and she would want me to do something at the graduate level for this and I'd never even taken basic logic.
So that was like kind of a no-go, but didn't It didn't matter.
But the other two immediately said yes and all of them had recent books.
So I just worked through their books chapter by chapter and like just worked like crazy and like It just strikes me as a very deliberately or accidentally smart way to approach things by going through someone's book, right?
I mean, on one hand you're kind of flattering them by going through it so seriously.
And then secondly, benefiting from getting their clarification, stress testing your own interpretations, and maybe criticisms. Oh, yeah.
Oh, I would read a chapter and I'd be like, "But what about this?
And this seems wrong to me and I can't understand this.
And I don't know why you did that."
And they got like I mean, I don't have any of that material anymore.
I'm sure some of it was the kind of like was raw, you know, like it kind of dumb question material.
But I think some of it was not bad.
Like, you know, I mean, I did think it through really really carefully and I'm reasonably intelligent and so I think I was able to come up with an interesting kind of challenging you know, 20-page discussion of their chapter.
So they would write back to me these long And their their letters back to me were always very long, like at least 10 pages, sometimes more. It's incredible. They were great.
If we zoom out, what is the role of philosophy in our modern times?
I'm just going to use this moment to give a shout-out to Agnes Callard who you should absolutely interview, who has a new book on this.
Oh, I have questions about her as well. Yeah.
I mean, I think there are lots of roles for philosophy and there's the question is like what is it in general and then what part of it am I interested in in particular in my in my career.
And I mean, I think philosophy plays a lot of different roles.
In particular, like that's most basic role is really to teach you how to think about things.
And that involves This is goes back to analytic philosophy's weirdness.
You can't think about something unless you have some kind of conceptual framework for it, you know?
You got to be able to like provide some structure to your thoughts in order to you know, something like, "Okay, what are you going to take as fundamental?
What do you take the framework to be here? What does this apply to? What do my terms mean?"
And even just doing that can teach you an awful lot about something.
So I wanted to think about like the nature of time and how the mind embeds itself in the world and how we understand ourselves as ourselves as selves in time.
And to do that in a productive way, I absolutely had to like learn a bunch of stuff about, you know, like what is what does identity through time mean? Like what even is time?
What do you mean by a point of view?
Like what is you know, what's so important about the way that we experience ourselves in time? Lots of stuff.
And so the primary goal I think of philosophy is to kind of teach you how to think about these things.
about these things. But there are lots of like, you know, lots of other important things like I teach a class here at Yale that I think of as it's sort of like philosophy of mind for computer scientists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, as well as philosophy
majors because it's all about showing how really interesting kinds of philosophical concepts are coming up all the time now with like artificial intelligence and all the questions about like what it means for a machine you know, could a machine be intelligent? Do
Do LLMs have any kind of knowledge?
You know, what is chain of thought reasoning? Why is this helpful?
All kinds of things that really actually, if it's framed the right way, people see are super relevant to the work that they're doing.
Even engineers who don't tend to be especially philosophically inclined as a group. No shade on engineers.
It's just like, you know, people have their preferences.
I mean, I think that's the the most basic thing.
I also think the role of philosophy is to kind of uncover or discover like some of the most fundamental truths about both human beings and about the nature of the world.
And that's a beautiful thing to be able to study.
Like it's such a like it's so incredible to be able to spend my time thinking about these things.
How do vampires fit into into your life and and why do they fit in to to your writing? Oh, vampires. I love vampires.
So many ways they fit in.
My favorite thought experiment involves vampires because I like to use it to illustrate the concept of transformative experience because I think it's maybe just because I like vampires so much, I think it's an especially good way to kind of illustrate the I don't think vampires are real.
And the beautiful thing about a thought experiment is you can design it the way that you want to kind of illustrate the structure of a concept.
And then if you want to But then I also think that the structure of that concept then fits to real life cases.
So my example, I'm just going to tell you so. Yeah, let's do it. All right.
So the way that I think about this is I imagine or you imagine, I ask you to imagine traveling through some part of you know, on your summer vacations of traveling through some part of Europe and you decide to explore a castle.
You're in Romania, let's say, and you go down to the dungeons and Dracula comes to you and he says, "I want to make you one of my own.
I'm going to give you a one-time-only chance, right?
You could become one of my followers.
It'll be painless, right?
You'll enjoy it, in fact.
But this is a one-time-only chance and it's irreversible."
And then he says, "Go back to your Airbnb and think about it until midnight.
And if you choose to accept my offer, leave your window open.
And if you choose to decline it, leave your window shut and leave and never come back."
So I see this as a really interesting possibility because, you know, vampires are sexy, they look great in black.
They have amazing powers.
They probably have different kinds of sense perception. Immortal? Yeah. Well, virtually.
I mean, as long as they stay away from villagers with stakes and things like that. Virtually, virtually.
They have some things they have to check off, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
There's certain obstacles, but But in general, yeah, for all all intents and purposes, immortal.
And so this seems pretty cool. But they're not human.
You'd have to, you know, exit the human race.
You have to sleep in a coffin.
You can't enjoy the sunshine anymore and you have to drink blood, right?
And I try to I try to separate out some of the ethical questions.
So let's say it's artificial blood or the blood of humanely raised farm animals or something like that. Coffin's pretty cozy.
It's got some memory foam in it.
reasonably Okay, it's lined with satin, but it still might be a bit hard for my mattress preferences.
But the idea is that these things while they seem interesting, they also seem kind of alien, right?
And I think in particular, not only would you have to drink blood, but you will love the taste of it.
Like you will thirst for it, right?
And even ethical vampires have to kind of keep themselves from like sucking the blood of their human, you know, compatriots.
So that's quite alien and I wanted to kind of bring out how the possibility of becoming another kind of individual can seem incredibly alien because obviously I don't I take it that most of us don't enjoy or thirst after the taste of blood or think about the different varietals like it be some kind of fancy wine.
But if you became a vampire, you would. Yeah.
So the way that I think about it then is I continue the story and it's like, "Okay, so you rush back to your Airbnb and you start calling people or texting them telling you about what happened to you."
And you find out that a bunch of your friends have already become vampires.
So then you immediately want to find out, "Well, wait.
Tell me about what it's like.
Like what is it What do you What's it like to be a vampire? Do you like it? Should I do it?"
And they tell you that they love it and it's fabulous and it's totally incredible.
But they also tell you you can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire as a mere human.
They say life has meaning.
It has a kind of purpose that, you know, is exquisite.
But until you become a vampire, you can't possibly understand it.
You just don't You lack the capacity.
So you're like, "Okay, thanks. So what do I do?"
Because if you can't possibly understand what to be a vampire, then you either have to do it just because all of your friends do it and they say it's great and they tell you they think it would be great for you.
But there's no way you can actually kind of conceive of what it would be like to do that.
And it I'm sure it hasn't escaped your thought.
It certainly didn't escape my imaginings that well, maybe there's something about being a vampire that makes you really happy to be a vampire. Right?
So maybe like when you become this other species, there's some kind of biological evolutionary thing that makes you really glad that you're a vampire. Right.
So it's not even clear their testimony applies.
So that's my example and my favorite application is to becoming a parent because speaking as someone who wasn't quite clear about whether they wanted to have children.
I have two children and I love them very much and I'm very happy.
much and I'm very happy. But there's something about becoming a parent that makes you like producing the child that you actually produce that makes you very like you love I mean I love my children I wouldn't exchange them for anything else in the world you know if I'd gotten pregnant a month later I would have
loved that child too but there's no way that I would exchange my current child for the child I could have had you just get incredibly attached to these children in a completely legitimate way and you wouldn't do anything you know you would never change what you've done and that's awfully like the testimony that you get from vampires
you stay up a lot at night right there are many similarities vampires kind of illustrate the possibility of undergoing a transformative experience like a life-changing something that's life-changing but also where you change the kind of mind you have in a certain way or what you care about most in a certain way that means that you would make yourself into a kind of alien
version of yourself like someone who's alien to you now and who you might not even want to be now even if once you become that person or that version of yourself you're super happy like if I had some kind of modal scope and I could look at my future self before I decided I wanted to have kids I got up at 4:00 a.m. every day for years to write before m.
a.m. every day for years to write before my children woke up I mean no one ever told me that that was I was something I wanted to would want to do and if they had told me I would have denied it strenuously because I could barely get up before noon when I was a graduate student and I did it willingly
something happened I was clearly a victim of some kind of Stockholm syndrome so the thought is that when you face a certain kind of transformative experience and I don't think it's just having a child I think like deciding to go to war or maybe moving to an entirely different country
or maybe getting some kind of if you're diagnosed with some kind of disease and getting some kind of like radically experimental treatment there are lots of things that can count as transformative but if you don't know what it's going to be like on the other side of that experience
and you know it's going to make you into a version of yourself that right now you find alien I don't think that there's a clear like I don't know how we're supposed to make that decision if it's up to us we can't use the ordinary models that we use for rational decision-making because those assume that you can see through
the options to assign them value and and model them for yourself and choose in a way that's going to as you say it and we say it in a technical way maximize your expected value and if you can't assign value and you can't really understand what it's like to be this kind of a self
then that procedure just doesn't work tell me if I'm off base here but also fundamentally as even if you were trying to calculate or maximize your expected value and assign these different values you're doing it from the perspective of your current version of yourself and your current preferences exactly and after
you become a vampire or after you have a kid you may be a different person with different preferences so do you make the decision based on the preferences of your current self or the preferences of your expected future self right there's a way of capturing the puzzle just as you said given
the fact that certain kinds of very foundational new kinds of these are new kinds of experiences so a kind of experience you've never had before and I compare this to like Mary in growing up in a black and white room and seeing color for the first time or Thomas Nagel talking about you can't
understand like for a bat what it's like for a bat to be a bat yeah exactly so there are these new kinds of experiences that are just very different from any kind of experience we've had before and so that means there's just a sense in which we can't kind of from the inside kind of
imagine what they're like even if someone can describe try to describe to me like what it's like to see red and you see the problem right away we just don't like language just kind of gives out if I haven't seen red before if I have no color vision okay so there's a sense in which we kind of
can't see through a certain kind of veil and across that veil the self that we're going to be the kind of person that you're going to realize is just like really different so you can't just assume you're going to be basically the same this puts us into the situation where you're making a choice
right for your future self and that future self might have preferences that are super different from your current self Mhm and by definition so now here's a little technical bit so we talked about the intuitive idea and again it's I see it I find it easy to understand when I think about someone who doesn't
maybe doesn't want to have a child or really is unsure and they know that if they choose to have a child they're going to be super happy with that result but they don't trust the fact that in virtue of like becoming a parent it's going to kind of rewire them and their preferences in a certain way right
Mhm sure I'll be really happy but I don't know if I want to be that self right now given who I am now I know I can't understand in a really deep way what it's going to be like to have that child so I have to kind of you know like leap over the abyss or leap into the abyss I guess if I want to do it
Mhm so if you find yourself in that situation what you're confronting involves what I describe as a violation of act state independence okay so here's the technical part comes you've got the intuitive idea act state independence involves very roughly a distinction between the act that you're performing and the
state that you're in or that's how I'm going to interpret it here there are different ways to interpret it but this is the way to do it here and so normally when you're confronted with oh do I want to do something do I want to try this kind of ice cream or do I want to have this cup of coffee
you don't change in the process of trying it so after the process after you do it you can kind of assess oh I liked it oh it was good and that's meaningful to you beforehand because you know that you're going to stay constant through the change in your circumstances like having tasting the new kind of ice cream
but in this case having the experience let's say tasting the new kind of ice cream was going to like rework your preference profile your flavor profile so that you would just like a whole bunch of different things after that well that changes the state that you're in at the same time and so your act and
your state are not independent and if you break that that's actually like a foundational like that's a an axiom for rational choice theory like that has to be a foundational element of the model to make straightforward inferences there are all kinds of fancy things you have to do if that breaks and these cases of
transformative experience and decision-making are precisely cases in which that breaks Mhm so I want to make a few references and read something here the first is I I have to say if this philosophy thing doesn't work out for you you should be a copywriter for Madison Avenue because
the transformative experience grew out of as I understand it a working paper titled what you can't expect when you're expecting that's pretty clever I have to give you that is very very clever and I want to read just a paragraph from Alice Gregory this is again from the New Yorker piece which I think
underscores a lot of angst that sort of modern well-educated folks have particularly women I would I would think but men also Mhm and here we go all right so this is from the piece when I approached Paul about the possibility of a profile it was in the spirit of self-help I was 31 and obsessed with
whether or not I should have a child the question felt huge and opaque like one that neither data nor anecdote could solve I thought about it all the time though quote unquote thinking is probably too precise a verb it was more like a constant buzz scoring the background of daily life in a tone that
registered somewhere between urgency and tedium she's a very good writer yeah she's really great the bad parts were easy to picture less time less sleep less money the awesome parts spelling a new person out of my own body say were quite literally inconceivable the dilemma felt impossible as if I were
attempting to convert dollars into the currency of a country that didn't yet exist so I think that really does a brilliant job of putting into words what a lot of people feel so if you can't as one of my friends I don't want to name him but very very successful chess competitor said
you can't always calculate to mate meaning that's right yeah no I get it you can't game it out that's right if you try to make a plan from move one to the end of the game and then in your opponent's third move they do something unexpected this whole calculate to mate doesn't work now there are some situations
perhaps in which you can do that you can reverse engineer and plot out step by step how you might achieve something and kind of execute a plan but then you have these transformative experiences and I suppose I'm wondering and God you must get sick of people asking this but what do you do given the difficulty and
the different nature of these types of decisions how do you approach it because in some of the reading I've done because I don't have kids I would like to have kids yeah I would like to hit some pre-reqs first before I do that but there are some things say moving to a different country which in most
instances are going to be reversible so yes it could be transformative but you could move back to your country of origin having a kid less so right Mhm and I'm curious what advice you give to people when they come to you ringing their hands and say well how do I do it then because
you could make the argument that you can ascribe a value to the learning and transformation itself of leaping into the abyss with a transformative experience but then it strikes me that you would always you'd be at the risk of always being biased towards action right doing the thing that could potentially be
transformative and then what do you do well things are not always good when you like transformation does not entail there's a kind of popular conception of transformative experience involving a kind of epiphany and that kind of thing and that can happen for sure but the way I'm talking about transformative
experience it's not always like that remember that whole thing about like you suffer I mean you kind of don't mind it but you certainly suffer this is an aside but I specialize in asides please yeah I live part of my time in New York and part of my time in New Haven. And in New
And in New York, the neighborhood I live in is it's kind of a funky neighborhood and I've toyed with the possibility of like on Sundays hanging out my shingle and being like I specialize in transformative experiences and big life choices.
You know, you could book time with me to discuss your philosophical your philosophical life choice you'd be like I feel like you need a desk in Prospect Park. Exactly.
I mean, in the neighborhood I live in this would not be an unusual type of thing in Brooklyn, you know?
And that's by way of saying and I thought about it and I thought, well, I'm not going to be able to give people any answers.
I'll just be able to sort of talk to them about like the conceptual framework for that choice.
And if that's of interest, not clear to me that would be of interest, then maybe I have a possible side gig.
Really what I'm saying is that all right, I'm much better at raising questions than answering them. I do have a view.
I don't think very many people like my view, but I'm going to tell you my view. I still like my view.
Well, I I don't like my view.
I just think it's like I haven't come across anything better, which isn't exactly the space you want to be in. Okay.
I what I really think is that it's a special class of experiences, right?
Like it's not like every experience is transformative.
I really don't that we could talk about the reason why that's the case.
I think there's a fairly well-defined class of certain kinds of life experiences that can count as transformative, not for everyone, but for many people that that undergo them.
And I think what's really important is to recognize how problematic they are.
Like they don't fit the ordinary framework because people like Alice talks about, she agonized. I agonized.
And for me, I was really annoyed because I agonized and I didn't get anywhere.
And then I had a baby and I was like oh, none of the things I was reading, which is why what you can't expect when you're expecting, you know, so satisfying because I hated what you could expect when you're expecting.
It was the worst book ever.
It answered no questions for me whatsoever.
It none of it addressed what I wanted to know.
And so it was like an insult on top of everything else, right? I'm sorry.
I apologize preemptively to everyone who found that book a wonderful book. Wasn't for me.
Alice talked about in the article how there was this moment when like I was, you know, like starting to go into labor and it was like, oh my god, this enormous thing has to come out of me.
How's that going to happen?
Like I knew theoretically that that was going to happen, but it's presented to you in a very personal way, in a very intimate way when you go into labor.
And I just discovered the reality of it in a special way. Yeah.
So, what I'm trying to say is that I I want my work to sort of help people realize that this kind of agonizing is actually completely reasonable because there isn't any easy answer and we don't have a framework.
And when there's something kind of almost inconceivable that's happening then it's a bit like as I said earlier, like you step off the ledge into the deep and flailing might be the only response. Okay.
So and I also think this is just part of like this is part of what it is to live a life and to be human.
And you can it's perfectly legitimate to pass on transformative experiences, but part of living a life and being open to possibilities involves choosing some of them. Like for most people.
And also, things happen to us that are like this that we don't choose, like terrible accidents, for example. Mhm.
There's a there's a philosopher named Paul Sagar who's been writing a Substack on he was a climber and he had a catastrophic accident. Oh, yeah.
And you know, his writing is beautiful and he talks about he's quadriplegic now.
And the life change that that involves is clearly transformative and clearly horrible and he wouldn't have chosen it and that makes sense, but he has to now discover like this new way of being an agent basically because he lacks so much agency in so many fundamental ways. Okay.
So, I want people to like articulating the conceptual framework that's involved in diagnosing why there's a kind of incoherence in having to try to make this choice where you're supposed to know what you're doing is part of the solution.
Maybe it's just something that we have to accept.
Now, in my book, here's my unpopular solution.
My unpopular solution is to say, well, maybe we can reframe the choice so that when we're making a choice, so this presumes that we have enough information to know that there's at least, you know, a very high chance that it's going to be at least pretty good as opposed to a very high chance it's going to be terrible or bad or whatever.
We use evidence in all kinds of reasonable ways to know that kind of thing.
But when we're confronted with something like, do I want to like go to war or do I want to emigrate to another country or do I want to have a child or, you know, pick your favorite case.
You know do I want my child to have a cochlear implant?
We talked about you alluded to that earlier.
You're not going to be able to know what it's like and you are going to change who you are.
And so then the question is, do you want to discover that new way of living?
And if you do with all the plusses and minuses, all the suffering because I think transformative experiences almost always involve suffering of some sort, then you go for it.
And if you don't, which I think is also perfectly reasonable, then you don't.
And because I don't think it's a matter of like rationality, so I think when just because some people have children and they're super happy that they did and it doesn't mean that that's just true for everyone even if it would be the case that for almost everyone they would reform themselves so they would be happy with their choice.
There's no inference to the best explanation there.
Just because many vampires testified to being happy that they've become vampires does not mean that everyone should become a vampire, especially somebody who just finds that way of being alien. Yeah.
In the case of having kids specifically, I mean, I remember a friend of mine, he has he has three kids now and he he he was kind of ambivalent, I guess.
His wife really wanted kids and he was in the fortunate position of being able to provide and they they wouldn't have struggles on that level, but he said, well, look.
He said at some point when you get old enough he's like, to have meaning you have to either find God or have kids and he's like having kids is easier.
So, he had kids and he said it in jest, but I've thought about the comment because like to what extent is the reforming of oneself after kids actually very time-tested and conforming to like millennia plus of evolutionary pressure, right?
Where it's like the basis of of instincts.
And in so being, is it I mean, this is going to sound like a really naive question, but sort of a safer bet with respect to transformative experience than some of the others?
Going to war or otherwise.
Now, I I also know people who have who have had kids and in some cases they were very clear that they did not want kids.
They weren't ambivalent and their partner really wanted kids and that I've not seen always turn out very well. Mhm.
So, it's not a guarantee, but are there different species of transformative experiences within the category of transformative experience?
Do you think about say kids differently than you'd think of some of the others?
Well, that's interesting.
So, I'm sure there are different species of transformative experiences.
So, what I heard you asking me part of that question involved, well, look, you know, maybe we can rely on biology in a certain way or we should this is a time time-tested solution.
So you can pick transformative experience one, transformative experience two, transformative experience three.
Behind door one is having a child.
Behind door two is you traveling the world, seeing, you know, all the wonders, whatever, exploring, you know, having lots of money to spend on travel and satisfaction, that kind of thing.
Behind door three is pursuing your intellectual passion, let's say, you know, to the the fullest degree, devoting all of your time to that.
I can go on, but there's three options there.
And I do think that choosing one of those involves tradeoffs on the others as much as some people might say, I'll do it all.
I'll have a child and we'll we'll cross the plains of Siberia together.
You know, and it very rarely works out that way, right?
And if you do cross the plains with the baby, you're slower.
And the wolves follow you.
All right, I won't go there.
So So, you might say, well, these are different risky choices and if you want to maximize your expected utility in some sense, maybe you should choose door one because people say that's right.
And I may actually think that seems kind of reasonable to me in a certain way if you're truly indifferent between these different options.
I think people are rarely are indifferent.
But the further problem is they're not indifferent and yet there's a sense in which they don't really know what they're choosing between, right?
I mean that's the further complication.
So again, going back to what I was saying is it's more like which life do I want to find out about?
Which one feels more appealing to me?
I don't know in many of the most salient ways what any of these lives could be like.
I don't even know, you know, how it's going to fill out because there's so many so many chancy things about each of those.
You know, you could have a child that's disabled. Sure.
And that could be a beautiful thing, but it can also be a very time-consuming, very painful thing.
And I don't know, you could pursue your intellectual passion and it could fall flat or it could just turn into this like amazing opportunity.
So, there's just a lot of chance involved in in any of these choices.
I don't think you either have children or or find God because I think there's so many other really interesting things people can do with their lives.
And I look at the person who I try to look at the person who I would have been or become if I had not had children.
That person is very different from who I am now along some dimensions and very much the same with who I am. Mhm.
But I I can't really get into her head.
I don't know I don't really know what she would have been like, but I'm also sure she would have lived like a super fun interesting life.
Let me ask if I'm going to make you the philosophical therapist for a second here. You already were. You already asked me. I'm I'm I'm know. I know.
Let's take this out of the toothpaste tube.
But if you could and maybe you put it back on, but if you take off the philosophy professor hat for a second and just reflect on your personal experience. Two things.
Like was the decision to have a child hard for you?
Did you go back and forth and vacillate or was it pretty straightforward?
And then secondly, if there was some back and forth, how much of that was the having or not having a child or what that experience would be like versus For instance, for me, I I feel very confident that I would enjoy being a parent and that I'd be pretty good at it.
I'm sure I'd up every which way you can imagine, but like above average.
I think I'd be I think I'd have a pretty good go of it.
But then the concern for me has always been, well, if things don't work out with the partner, what does that look like? Right?
So it's it's more of like a possible separation after having kids that has been the concern for me, not so much the parenting, which has a bunch of embedded assumptions, right?
But what was that decision like for you personally?
It was complicated because on the one hand, it's funny.
When I was younger, I never wanted children and then when I hit my 20s, I think I thought, oh, yeah, that would be a really I you know, that's a real that's a real possibility.
Like I would love to, you know, be happily married and have and have a family.
But it seemed a bit remote, too.
Like I liked I thought that that seems like an option for me.
And it would be a good option.
But then I thought, but I also really want to, you know, study philosophy and spend as much of my time as possible doing philosophy, you know, like this is the this is the kid I don't guess I was still a kid then, you know, reading people's books and writing like basically 60 to 70 pages of material over every 2 weeks like and sending it, you know, this took a lot of time cuz I had to read it.
I didn't have any training and I would write all this stuff and I was just obsessed.
I was also doing other things at the same time like I was still reading Being and Time.
So I spent all of my time doing philosophy and I didn't want to change that.
So on the one hand, I had a desire to have children.
Some people just feel like their life wouldn't have meaning without I never felt that way.
I just thought this would be one interesting good way to live one's life.
But then I had this desire to spend my time doing philosophy and also philosophy is a male-dominated field and it certainly was back in the '90s.
And there was definitely a professional cost to having a child and I think there still is.
It's not as bad as it used to be, but sometimes I don't think people think you're you're less serious now although I think they used to think that.
But you still have like less time and you have less money and that has a perfect like there are clearly like professional implications.
Maybe for women in particular, but I think everybody.
You're not solely devoted to your to your projects anymore.
Somebody else is more important.
So there was a kind of ambivalence and so I thought, well, being a rational thinker, I'm going to evaluate it. Right?
I'm going to think about what it's going to be like.
I'm going to make my choices and that was where it all fell apart, right?
That was where I was betrayed by what you couldn't expect what you're expecting and so many other parenting things that I looked for.
I mean, I didn't immediately I tried to do it. I couldn't do it.
But I didn't know I couldn't do it until I actually had the children then I was like, oh, this is nothing like what I was going to expect.
And then that was when I had this moment before my son was born when I was like, wait a minute.
Actually my daughter was only very young.
I was like, wait, this actually was really when after I'd recovered from giving birth and started getting enough sleep so I could think clearly again.
I was like, wait, this was an utterly bizarre, strange metaphysical experience and I mean metaphysics not in the aura shaping way, but like metaphysics like I do like, you know, the nature of reality seemed to change for me in certain ways.
And also epistemologically, you know, did change so much about how I experience and represent the world.
This is just so foundational, but philosophers never talk about this.
Like no philosophers talked about this, at least not in my tradition.
And I thought, I have to talk about this, which by the way, I think Alice talked about this, was very scary because I'd built up this reputation as being a serious philosopher talking about the nature of causation and time.
And then I was going to talk about babies.
So I had to steel myself.
So to answer your question, there was a lot of ambivalence.
But then my husband at the time wanted to have children, so that sort of tipped the balance.
I'm not sure what I would have done if he had been equally ambivalent. Mhm.
So many different directions that we can go.
I want to ask you and I know you said earlier don't don't ask me to explain it or that you'd have trouble explaining, but I'm still curious about this move from chemistry and, you know, this maybe the so-called hard sciences to philosophy and that you knew you wanted to do that.
Now you jokingly said you may not want to drop acid and explore some of these other questions.
I'm just wondering what precipitated this itch that you had to scratch with philosophy.
Well, there's got to be something.
I mean, I can't imagine there's nothing as far as inputs that affected that.
I mean, I honestly don't know where I formed the idea that this was going to be the thing for me.
I did I loved to read and when I was in high school, I read I read Herman Hesse. Mhm.
Like The Glass Bead Game.
I read other kinds of interesting books.
I remember I read I liked Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's work.
And and these are like philosophical texts. Mhm.
And maybe not analytic philosophy, but there's a lot of philosophy in there.
I think this reading and other things I read led me to realize that a certain kind of quasi-philosophical take on the world was congenial to me.
When I say quasi-philosophical, it was truly philosophical, but at the time I didn't wouldn't wasn't able to kind of recognize it as such.
I just knew I had this yearning to try to understand things and philosophy seemed like the right way to go.
But it I really can't really give you more than that.
Like my parents really wanted me to be a doctor.
I went on med school visits. I took the MCAT. I did everything.
You know, I failed out of I didn't fail out of philosophy classes.
I just failed to progress in philosophy classes.
Like all the signs were pointing away from philosophy and I still did it.
There's no explanation that I But I'm I you know, I I'm going to push a little I'm going to push you don't believe me. I know. Okay.
No, I'm I'm going to push a little bit because I would just say one way to frame it would be what drew you to philosophy.
Another one another angle would be what didn't satisfy you of That's fair.
the explorations of chemistry, etc. , etc. That's right.
So maybe you could take a stab at the latter.
Okay, so here it comes some further naivete.
I was extremely good at the theoretical side of chemistry and extremely terrible at the lab side of chemistry.
So I thought, well, maybe maybe I want to be a chemist.
I loved solving problems in organic chemistry. I loved it.
But then we had to take part of my major I had to take a class called gravimetric analysis, I think it was called.
And this consists of an entire semester doing incredibly minute measurements and cooking like there were little clay pots we had to cook at high temperatures that were filled with the compound that we were analyzing.
You could cook it and you would measure these tiny things and you spent the entire semester on one project.
And it was the kind of thing where like, you know, if you touched it, oil from your finger would get onto the clay pot and would destroy all of your work.
So what happened after a semester?
Like it was probably the last 3 weeks of hours and hours in the lab and then I brush cuz I'm like physically just it's just I brush the side of the pot and it's gone. All of my work. I was devastated.
Now we're now we're getting somewhere. Okay.
I went into an existential crisis basically and I was like, I cannot do chemistry. I can't do it. No, it's not for me.
Now, if I were more sophisticated, I would have learned, oh, no, you can like run the lab and like other people do that part if you're physically inept in certain ways.
But I didn't know that and I didn't realize how much, you know, how many more options that would be.
Anyway, and I was destroyed, but it wasn't just that, but I I never enjoyed lab. I wasn't good at it. It wasn't my thing.
And I felt that natural science, it does require a certain, you know, you run a lab even if you're doing highly theoretical work.
And so that side I needed something a little bit more pure.
I think that combined with like I said, like being drawn to some of these, you know, like like literature and art that had this, you know, conceptual dimension that involved the role of experience again in understanding like who you are.
When I moved out of my parents' house and moved to Chicago, I just, you know, I found myself immersed in like art and literature and my friend like I was working at a bar and a lot of the people working at the bar were like doing theater or were artists and it was just a whole new way of of being that I loved and so I knew there was something out there Mhm.
that my natural science education wasn't connecting with. Yeah. Okay.
That makes perfect sense to me.
And thank you for thank you for doing the digging. I appreciate it. I love that story.
The finger oil in the lab. Even now, oh, the pain. Sorry. Yeah, brutal.
You mentioned, I think, semi-philosophical works and you mentioned Herman Hesse and my next question is for someone who is on some deep level interested in the types of questions that attracted you to philosophy, Ren. Mhm.
But they have had some trepidation or maybe mild allergic reaction around philosophy as such when they've tried to dig into it.
Maybe they went to a philosophy section of bookstore and picked up three books and they're like, "Wow, I'm too dumb to understand this or this is just too impenetrable.
I don't know what to do with this."
What entry points might you suggest?
If you had 100 undergrads fresh you know, blank slates and you're like, "Okay, I want to have the highest kind of conversion rate as possible."
Meaning, "I want to get as many of these people deeply interested in any aspect of philosophy.
Are there certain books that you might recommend?
They don't have to be philosophical texts as such. If that makes sense.
I have to think about this for a second. I will say one.
Quentin Smith wrote this very weird book called The Felt Meanings of the World, which I always loved. It's weird.
The Felt Meanings of the World?
Yeah, The Felt Meanings of the World.
It captures something for me even, you know, when I was kind of just trying to approach philosophy.
So, I think a lot of fiction can be very philosophical. I would read Ted Chiang.
He's really, really good. Oh, so good. So good.
Everybody should read Ted Chiang. Everybody should.
And I mean, a lot of his work is just like deeply philosophical, right? Mhm. And explicitly so.
I mean, he's interested in counterfactuals and in metaphysics in particular in these really beautiful ways, right? And the nature of time.
Just because that term has come up a few times, could you just take a sidebar and and Define it? Define counterfactuals.
Yes, so counterfactuals involve Even the word tells you like counter to fact things.
So, if I say "If I had wings, I would fly across my office." Now, I don't have wings.
So, I can't fly across my office.
But if I did have wings, I certainly would cuz that would be super cool.
And we can understand them.
We can understand like counterfactuals in terms of like other possible worlds.
So, in a world where I have wings, right?
I would fly across the room.
Or what if what if the Third Reich dominated the world after World War II. Something like that. Exactly. Exactly.
It turns out like counterfactuals can be you need what's called a preferred semantics for them, like a a rule book for understanding how to interpret them.
And my supervisor, David Lewis at Princeton, was like the person who developed the primary rule book for that, which is what the foundation of of much of his work involved.
But they play a role like in natural science.
So, when people are doing tests, let's say, on some new kind of treatment, you want to find out whether or not a new drug like, well, you know, cure a disease or something like that, right?
So, what you want to do is you you want to treat a population and see what happens.
And then you compare it to the counterfactual, well, what if they hadn't been treated?
Now, the complication is in these kinds of contexts, you can't move to a possible world, but you can establish a control group which is basically supposed to be matched to that treatment population.
And then you see how the control group evolves without the treatment and compare it to the treated population who gets the medicine, right?
So, the role of a counterfactual can sometimes be to sort of identify ways the world could be and also like ways the world could have been if you hadn't changed it, something like that.
There's lots more, but that's basically Ted Chiang is good at weaving counterfactual scenarios. Exactly.
He's good at exploring other possible worlds in some ways.
And when I start talking about other possible worlds, the way that it relates to my work is I think about like other possible selves, right?
So, if I had chosen differently and not chosen to have a child, well, there's another possible world out there where I don't have any children.
And so then the question is, well, how do I make sense of that other possible world?
And one thing I can't do, as I said to you before, because the real world involved me transforming myself into a parent, means there's a kind of lack of understanding across that barrier.
I can't really understand who I would have become.
And Chiang exploits that kind of notion all the time.
Like, well, what if, you know, time were different or you know, what if aliens, you know, like came to us and we had to kind of interpret what, you know, what they were saying and the process of interpreting what they were saying changed our conception of how time Oh, so good. Super cool.
You know, all kinds of stuff, right?
If people want a light lift and it is different from the short story upon which it's based, but watch the movie Arrival. Exactly.
And as a linguistics nerd also, my god, that really is unbelievably good movie.
I think it's 95 plus percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
And then he has collections of short stories.
It's always hard for me to remember the first one, but it's like Stories of Our Lives and Other Short Stories, something like that. Yeah, that's right.
And then his second collection came out, Exhalation, and I was like, "Ah, it's just going to There's no way it can match the first collection."
And lo and behold, I was like, "Okay, you win, Ted Chiang." He's so good.
All right, any other any other fiction that comes to mind? Borges, also. I just love Borges.
I mean, I just feel like he's always exploring like Borges is amazing. Yes. Yes.
Where would you suggest people start with Jorge Luis Borges?
Where would you Any any favorites?
The Garden of Forking Paths is an excellent one if we're talking about possibilities.
The Garden of Forking Paths is like it's a beautiful it's a beautiful one.
The Aleph, I would suggest.
I actually think The Garden of Forking Paths and I think it's The Aleph are two really excellent things to read.
These are incredibly philosophical texts, okay? Yeah.
And what I love about them is you can get the intuitive idea without having to go through all the philosophy.
But to extract it precisely, you get it.
It's beautiful when the way they express these ideas, but if you want to extract it with precision in a way that you can then take the idea and use it in other ways, that's what you you need the analytic philosophy to do that in my view.
Literature just doesn't lend itself to getting some kind of precise thing extracted from it in a straightforward way.
That's just not what it's for.
This is going to sound like a dumb question.
Maybe it is a dumb question, but like to develop the chops with analytic philosophy seems to require a lot.
Doesn't seem to be a light lift. No.
For somebody who's listening who doesn't have any exposure to it, is the juice worth the squeeze?
And if so, what is the juice that makes it worth the squeeze?
I mean, well, look, I devoted my life to it.
So, obviously, I think the juice is worth the squeeze. But No, I get it. Yeah, no, no.
I mean But just like if if you're going to study like material science to develop new surgical techniques as an orthopedic surgeon, like doing that deep dive could very well be worth it for that person.
But if someone hasn't medical school, maybe not, right?
So, I'm just curious to what extent you'd recommend a lay listener try to develop the toolkit of analytic philosophy.
I think for some people they're fine with like literature or sci-fi or reading.
I think you can get a lot of philosophy through kind of like listening to Bach or you know, reading Darwin's biography or doing mathematics.
So, I think the first question is if you engage with the philosophical ideas in a non-technical way, if that satisfies you, then you're good.
But if it leaves you wanting more, if you start asking questions, "Well, wait a minute. How does this work?"
or you know, you watch a time travel film.
I recommend Primer or La Jetée or 12 Monkeys. Ooh, hold on.
I'm going to write these down. Okay.
12 Monkeys is a great one. Okay, Primer.
Oh, if you love 12 Monkeys, something in French that I didn't catch.
Dude, you need to watch La Jetée because 12 Monkeys just plagiarized La Jetée. Oh, okay.
Well, then I'll watch the original. How do you spell this?
It's like 35 minutes long.
It means the jetty in French.
L A, la, and then jetty, J E T E E. All right. You can watch it online. It's a beautiful film.
It's actually it's a kind of artwork film and it's very artsy.
And the story that it tells was retold by 12 Monkeys. It's the same thing.
Wait, it's French and artsy? I'm not getting it. What do you mean? Yeah, how could it be? Yeah, exactly.
But what's great about it is it's entirely consistent.
And Primer is consistent except until the end they get a little they got a little carried away.
This I forgive them the last 5 or 10 minutes of the film.
And Pri- Primer is a beautiful, super cool film.
Kind of cult classic type of movie.
Anyway, if you watch these things and you're like, "Well, wait a minute."
Or if you watch Back to the Future and you're like, "Well, wait a minute.
You know, how can you change the past?"
Seems like that might be There's some kind of logical problem there.
Well, then, my friend, you are a philosopher at heart in various ways and you should put the time in to learn more because it's worth it.
If you really work out some of these questions, you can use them for other things.
And if nothing else, forcing yourself to kind of work through some of these puzzles, I think kind of just sharpens your reasoning capacities generally.
I'm not saying it's easy.
Remember that bit about suffering, right?
There's definitely some suffering.
But it can pay off and there's a kind of joy just in problem-solving or puzzle-solving that I feel like I get out of thinking through these things.
Lewis Carroll, another excellent thing to read. Oh, yeah. Lewis Carroll. What a what a master.
I have some collector's editions of old copies of Alice in Wonderland.
Not exactly that title, but Lewis Carroll, man.
Also, the just the bio on that guy was wild. Yeah. Yeah.
So, if somebody was willing they watch whatever it might be, primer or another back to the future.
They start asking questions.
You're like, "Hey, you might be a philosopher."
And they say, "Okay, given that, I want to pick up the ABCs of analytic philosophy, but in terms of suffering, I don't want my face ripped off, more like a mild sunburn." Right.
Where would you suggest they start? Yeah, good question.
I'm struggling with this part because I started with Being and Time, which isn't really what normal people would start with.
Yeah, you're like, "I like hiking.
Let me start with Everest." Yeah, exactly.
I mean, well, you can read my book. So, there you go.
That's the the podcast thing. fine. Yeah, yeah.
The book Transformative Experience was not written for non-philosophers.
And so, I do like go I go over arguments more than once. Mhm. Right?
I mean, so I am picking it apart in a way because I was aiming the book towards professional philosophers.
But, 100 pages of the book is not technical.
And then, the first chapter is only four pages long.
And I wrote the first chapter thinking, "Look, people might put it down, but maybe if they just read the first four pages, they'll at least see what the idea is."
So, yeah, you could look at my book. Yeah.
the first four pages and see what you think.
Yeah, mission accomplished. Yeah.
And then if you're like, "Wow, you know, I can I can digest more technical aspects."
Then you can dig into the footnotes, too.
Especially after the first 100 pages. Exactly.
The second half of the book is switches into much more technical argumentation.
And then, a good a great resource.
This is it's also it's written for other professional philosophers, but also really good for is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's online. It's free.
All the entries are written by professional philosophers.
It's not written to be accessible to non-philosophers, but it's absolutely fantastic.
Like, you can get a sense of it.
Take an entry, run it through ChatGPT for the highlights, whatever, you know, and get a sense of things.
Can you translate this from the Latin of the high priesthood into something I can understand, please? Exactly.
Tell me this in the words from a 12-year-old's perspective.
I would think you would get something interesting.
There are also various epistemology, a very short introduction.
I think Jennifer Nagel wrote that.
Could you define that term, also, for folks? Epistemology.
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge.
So, if I use the word epistemic, like an epistemic transformation, what I mean is it's changing what you know or how you makes how you kind of conceptualize or make sense of the world. Mhm. Okay.
So, I interrupted your train of thought there.
You were saying for epistemology, you might start with There's a series of very short introductions. Mhm. It's Oxford.
And they're written by experts in the field.
They're just really nicely done.
Again, they're not written to be entertaining, but they're written to be clear and accessible.
So, if you're willing to put in a little bit of work, you'll get something out of it, for sure. Yeah.
I'll just throw out a couple of quick questions.
Let's just say you're advising a student.
Could be undergrad, grad. They come to you.
This is within the context of philosophy department.
They're feeling kind of lost, maybe a little apathetic, nihilistic.
Although, nihilism we could probably define more precisely, but in the modern sort of pop culture sense.
Are there any recommendations for reading or self-inquiry or anything like that that you would recommend to them?
Doesn't It could also just be general life advice, but I'm I'm curious how you might tackle a situation like that.
First, read interviews with Borges where he goes through this kind of process, especially he has a book about where he talks about going blind. Mhm.
You see, it's not like I wasn't that kid.
The problem is the reason why I'm not coming up with things for you is because I was that kid in lots of ways, and I'm fascinated with by philosophy, and I knew there were questions that I wanted to ask, but I wasn't finding anything in the literature.
The reason why I started out with causation as a graduate student was partly because I found an intellectual like a deep close intellectual friend in David Lewis.
We just really kind of hit it off intellectually.
We could talk to each other in ways that were always metaphysics, but we just kind of understood each other's minds in a way that I I didn't connect with that really anyone else when I was doing my PhD. Mhm.
But, I felt that the tools of philosophy were beautiful tools.
I could see that in the history that what little I knew of the history of philosophy, deep basic questions had been asked, but they were solved in very different ways, especially because often God played a role in that like in and you know, at that time, and that really wasn't for me.
I'm not a religious person.
Although, I find religious belief really interesting and kind of fascinating in various kinds of contexts.
I have this paper called The Paradox of Empathy where I talk about the kind of divide between the atheist and the believer because there's this kind of fear like if you really open your mind to the other person that it's going to convert you in a way that you don't want to be converted.
It's going to change you into that alien self.
I think the atheist feels that way, and I think the believer feels that way.
Nobody ever argues someone into like religious belief or losing it.
It's all about like kind of occupying a different kind of conceptual space, and that just fundamentally changes the way you understand the world. Mhm.
So, I knew that philosophy had these tools, and I thought that they were excellent tools.
So, it was you know, I loved I loved solving problems.
Remember in this really rigorous way in organic chemistry, exploring mechanisms.
That's what all of the exams were always about.
My goal in college was to set the curve.
But, I I wasn't finding what I wanted.
I couldn't find the kinds of texts I wanted to address these questions.
So, I don't really have a lot for you.
I mean, I think Thomas Nagel's work is really really great.
The View from Nowhere is a is a beautiful book.
That might be a place to go.
I just did a little searching on the Borges piece.
So, it looks like Jorge Luis Borges wrote and spoke about his experience with blindness in a number of different contexts.
One was Seven Nights, Siete Noches, a collection of lectures that he gave in Buenos Aires in 1977. Yep, good choice.
Covering nightmares, Buddhism, and poetry and his own progressive blindness. Yes, exactly.
might be another place to start. Yes, I think so.
Reading Proust is also good, but these are not easy reads.
And they're not going to train you in philosophy, but they will put you into contact with the ideas that I think are beautiful and worth studying.
And then, you have to sweat through the training of your mind to get there. Mhm.
It's not like you start reading and you kind of get sucked in.
No, it's more like training for a marathon.
You have to kind of slowly agonize, and you know, when you when you're completely unfit, and it sucks. Okay?
Like, it's not like it's just going to You just run a little bit, and it feels great.
And then, you run a little bit more, and it feels great.
And then, somehow you get to 20 a 26, you know, No, it doesn't work that way.
I do think there's more work out there where people are starting to address these questions, but I'm finding myself at a little bit of a loss because because it was my dissatisfaction with what I was finding that led me to start like working on this topic, even though I felt like it was kind of deeply risky.
Yeah, I mean, it makes me wonder, also, if the I don't want to say solutions, but maybe if the life rafts for someone who's feeling those things might fall outside of philosophy. I don't know. Mhm. Mhm.
Are there any particular philosophical ideas or philosophies that you find consistently misrepresented or mistranslated in modern media or by self-help, broadly speaking?
Things that get co-opted.
I mean, I'm sure quantum physicists could have a field day answering this, right? Because Mhm.
their stuff gets grabbed by every kind of woo-woo self-help book that tends to come along.
First thing is it's super important to distinguish between our experience of time and time itself.
So, some people might not think there is any such thing as time. Think about it this way.
The easiest way to see the difference is imagine you're in a really boring lecture. Mhm.
And you're just sitting there like, "Oh, this is lasting forever."
And you look at the clock, and you realize you're only 15 minutes in. Okay?
Right there, your experience of time's passing has departed from like the objective measurement of time as measured by the clock. Okay?
So, there's just two different things, and I think this gets conflated all over the place.
And it gets really hard and really complex to think about these two different ways of kind of talking about time, but it's important.
Or like sometimes people talk about, you know, when they have a like they have a car accident.
This happened to me, actually.
I had a car accident, and I remember everything seemed to be going in slow motion. Mhm.
I didn't actually have have a car accident.
My car spun out of control late one night when I was driving on Michigan Avenue because I hit a patch of ice, and I went around and around and like in on Lake Shore Drive, it's got like four lanes going in each way. And I was like, "Whoa."
But, it was like 3:00 in the morning, and no one else was there.
So, I just like in slow motion, I watched myself go around and around and around like, you know, and I was like, "Well, this is bad.
Oh, but there's no one else here."
And then, I could you know, was able to kind of correct the car, come out of the spin.
But, it it felt like it happened over like two three minutes, and it was probably like 10 seconds, right?
20 seconds or something like that. Mhm.
It's a very common phenomenon.
The way that we perceive time just changes.
It comes apart from like the passing of time. Second thing, free will.
Just kill me This is a big one. Yeah, it's a big one.
And people are really fascinated with it, and I totally get it.
It's not my own favorite topic.
It's just a favorite topic of particular like neuroscientists, and they're all going to solve free will.
I respect an engaged discussion of free will from a scientist if they read some of the philosophy, but a lot of times they haven't read the philosophy, and they It's like they don't know what they don't know, you know?
So, that's that's a killer.
Related to free will is like fatalism, like thinking everything's determined.
Slightly different from free will.
And I love existentialism as a topic, and I love continental philosophy and phenomenology.
I recognize the phenomenology because I'm involved with a lot of scientific research.
And with say psychedelic compounds, the term phenomenology comes up a lot.
What is continental philosophy?
Is that like anything to do with continental breakfast? I don't know. I don't have no idea. Yeah, actually sort of.
So, it's a sort of disputed phrase.
So, I also describe what I do as like analytic philosophy and there's this rough It's hard It's not really a very good way of describing things, but it's the best one I have.
So, like traditions like say like Heidegger and like Foucault and Derrida come from like that kind of I think she's like my account is this.
Like there's a kind of a style of philosophy that kind of originated at least arguably on the European continent Mhm.
and is very different from like the kind of class you took with Gideon Rosen at Princeton, which is like, you know, classic like analytic philosophy, which kind of originated in the UK arguably with people like Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and people like that.
And also, I think with the positivists who kind of came over to the US particular around like, you know, trying to escape the Nazis in World War II.
And so, continental philosophy also can have strong connections with like psychoanalysis, whereas like analytic philosophy has many more connections to kind of contemporary science or very empirically grounded psychology, that kind of thing.
And I like both traditions a lot.
I don't super like the methods of continental philosophy.
I was trained as a natural scientist at least early on and I really like the approach, but I love the topics.
And it's pretty hard to talk about the very deep things that kind of philosophers talk about like the nature of being or who we are in some fundamental sense or, you know, how do we understand time using analytic techniques, but that's what I try to do.
What are some of the ways that you think philosophers will be most important in the broader world outside of academics, outside of the journals and so on?
Where do you think these philosophical explorations and toolkits will most intersect with applications in the broader world, whether it's related to certain technologies or otherwise?
When I went back before and I said like when the work on transformative experience that I'm doing tries to address this kind of situation we find ourselves at certain like foundational shifts that we undergo in certain life choice points. Mhm.
Whether we choose them or not actually like, you know, let's say I'm diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, you know, confronting that and making sense of that.
So, I think thinking philosophically is a really good tool for living one's life.
And that's what Agnes talks about by the way.
Agnes Callard in her new book, I think it's called Open Socrates.
And so, I do think that philosophy has a role there, but I also think it has applications for example like important applications in bioethics, important applications with artificial intelligence in particular thinking about ethics questions and value alignment with machines like trying to design
machines that, you know, kind of if they don't have human values kind of respect human values and and how we're going to really be able to do that in the context of actually undergoing these kinds of scientific and conceptual revolutions where we don't know what's coming down the pipe, transformative in my view. Mhm. Mhm.
I think there's lots of application also just with the kind of policies and thinking about for example precision in terms of how for example we want like say certain kinds of policies to affect people.
There's a lot of work like in political philosophy and philosophy of law and ethics, I think that that matters.
That's not not just bioethics, you know, and bioethics is its own kind of thing, which I think it there philosophers have made and should be making and continue to make like really important contributions.
So, I wanted to give Agnes a shout-out here.
So, Agnes Callard's newest book is Open Socrates, subtitle The Case for a Philosophical Life, which just recently came out January 14th, 2025.
And you've you've invoked her name a number of times.
She also wrote Aspiration, The Agency of Becoming in 2018.
Where would you say your positions or thinking most differ? You and Agnes.
Agnes has this view that if we want to change ourselves, we can aspire to change in various ways.
The new book is more about like living a philosophical life.
It's written for non-philosophers, so it's very accessible.
So, I was thinking, you know, it's something that people could try.
The other book Aspiration is is a technical book and she thinks, oh, well, you can just aspire to be someone different and that's how you can just train yourself up into kind of being that way.
I'm simplifying radically.
And I think there's a kind of incoherence in that because if I find somebody like being a parent or being a an opera singer or something like just fundamentally alien to who I am, there's no coherent way for me to aspire to do that.
So, our big difference is that and I have said this to her and she's like, yeah, but I just think like that our rationality model is broken, so that, you know, I don't mind if there's a kind of incoherence in my view.
And we're just really different in that way in the way that we approach these questions.
Agnes does the history of philosophy, she works on the classics and work in maybe metaethics and I approach things very much from a kind of philosophy of science, kind of metaphysics, epistemology, kind of more mathematical view, so we come from different perspectives that way, too. All right.
So, we'll link to Agnes's Open Socrates book in the show notes as well for everybody.
You have written on Reddit.
This was I'm not sure exactly when this was, but you find Aristotle's work especially inspirational.
Now, can't believe everything you read on the internet, so please feel free to fact-check that, but if that is a true statement, why is that the case?
I said that about Aristotle? That's what I have here. It's attributed to you.
This is the Reddit ask me anything. Right. Yes, exactly. I have no idea. I love that AMA. It was so fun.
I thought you were going to ask me about drugs because that was that ended up being half the conversation. Oh, okay.
Well, let's let's go to drugs. Let's talk about that.
That I'd rather talk about drugs than Aristotle.
I'm afraid I have no expertise in that area.
I know more about drugs than I do about Aristotle, so let's let's go to drugs. All right.
So, one of the cool things is that I've given a couple talks on this.
The framework that I was articulating is useful in when we're thinking about things like psychedelics because the conceptual framework of a transformative experience, which changes like opens your mind in a certain way because you have a new kind of experience and then at least in some contexts, that epistemic shift is so profound that it changes like how you understand yourself and the world. Yeah.
Ontological shock is something they use in the literature a fair amount. Yeah, exactly.
That applies to becoming a parent, I think, or a terrible thing like becoming quadriplegic, but it also can happen when you take psychedelics for the first time.
The way that I think about it is whatever neurological changes that taking your favorite your preferred type of psychedelics induces, it changes the nature of our perceptions.
And this is super interesting because in particular perceptual experience or sensory experience is already like not amenable to description.
Like when I said, "Hey, if you're colorblind and I tell you, oh, I'm going to describe what it's like to see red," you just haven't got enough to go on, you know? Yeah.
And and that's something about the way that we can't use testimony to communicate certain types of experiences, okay?
And psychedelics change the way that we experience the world through changing the character of our perceptions.
And I'm fascinated by this because I think I'm not sure exactly how I want to make sense of this philosophically, but I think it teaches something about how our minds connect with the world.
We learn somehow that actually the world is in some sense a world of representation because we can now discover a different kind of like a different way of representing the world and we realize, oh, when we go back to our old selves just how much the brain was doing to kind of contribute to to like everything that we're seeing.
I think that that's one of the lessons that people can get when they take psychedelics. Let's put it this way.
That's the lesson that I drew from it and I do think that people can draw this in less more or less technical ways.
But the other thing that this kind of, you know, experience can do is can kind of shift us, you know, epistemologically so that we can we change like how we kind of understand ourselves as as beings in the world, I think.
And it can does it does this partly like neurochemically, obviously.
The kind of neuroscientific, I guess, way of explaining this is to think, well, maybe for some reason there are certain different pathways that are activated in the brain at least for a few weeks after taking various kinds of psychedelics that can especially help people with like clinical depression or facing terminal illness.
But I think it's not just like that.
I think it's actually like you get this enriched sense of how here we are human beings like taking in through our senses and responding and constructing a world.
And it gives you it gives you a kind of clearer understanding of how we build ourselves.
And I feel like this makes us kind of attend more than to, you know, to the relationship we have like with the world in general and the relationships we have with other people.
So, and the transformative experience stuff kind of really fits that, so it's kind of cool.
And I definitely tried psychedelics before I ever wrote about transformative experience, but it wasn't what I was thinking about.
I think you were asking me leading questions earlier when I mentioned like dropping acid and not thinking about certain kinds of logical puzzles.
But it wasn't what led me to the stuff on transformative experience.
It was really having babies that was really shocking.
I wasn't implying that You weren't suggesting that oh, okay.
That the acid led to the book on transformative experience.
When you kept saying I really can't explain how I got into philosophy, I was like you just made like a passing comment related to acid and like there's a non-zero chance that that could have opened Pandora's box of all sorts of questions. I guess it could have.
I think it was more like I definitely had a lot of these experiences in college.
I was like wow, I really like kind of thinking these different kinds of thoughts.
But you know, reading literature also did that. not mutually exclusive.
The experiences with they don't need to be with psychedelics, but in altered states such as non-ordinary states of consciousness can, as you said very well, illustrate in a very felt first-person way how much of our reality and how much of our conception of the self is constructed, right?
And then when you come out of it, you're like huh, okay. Right.
Just like metaphysics is examining in some cases these underlying assumptions that maybe physicists take for granted when we're walking around being our skin-encapsulated ego, there's a lot we take for granted. Exactly.
And then when you suddenly are like I had this complete dissolution of the self and yet there was still felt experience, but there was no I.
What the does that mean, right? Exactly.
The thing is you can read all the theory in the world, but when you experience it, it gives you a different way of understanding.
And that's what I'm saying.
Just like seeing red for the first time.
You can hear all about red, but when you see it, you're like whoa, wait, there's something there that's more.
The theory, the words aren't sufficient to express all of the content. Mhm.
It's just how human minds are.
Yeah, well, it's like one of the cornerstones of mystical experience at least according to the assessments from say Johns Hopkins and so on is ineffability, which makes it very hard to describe to someone else. Yeah, exactly. It's a problem.
It's like oh well, it's ineffable.
Well, that's not helpful, you know. Yeah.
But again, this is what I was trying to capture with like the vampires.
I mean I say look, you know, life has meaning and a sense of purpose that you can't possibly understand as a human.
Like one of the interesting things about human minds is that we can discover new kinds of experience and before we know about those new kinds of experience, they're just ineffable.
Like there's just a conceptual problem there.
You have, I believe, a quote in your book from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Mhm.
And the quote I'm going to read and you can again fact-check me as needed, but watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma.
There it is before you smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with the air of whispering come and find out.
Uh we ultimately need to ask we're willing to plunge into the jungle of the new self, as you put it. Mhm.
So, before we go, are there any transformative experiences that you are sort of looking forward to with trepidation, with fear, or excitement, or decisions that you'll need to make, or it it could just be broadly experiences like you've mentioned, for instance, cognitive decline and so on.
I'm not saying you'd look forward to that.
Actually, no, no, that's the one. Yeah. That's the one.
Basically, I think that all of us face death, okay?
And you don't know how it's going to come in.
Frankly, I'd be perfectly happy to like have a heart attack in the middle of great sex.
Like that's obviously the best way to go.
But most likely, I'm pretty physically healthy, it's going to be a long, slow decline.
Alzheimer's is extremely common.
Some other kind of dementia.
And as an academic, especially someone who's like I mean, I love my intellectual project and losing my abilities is something that I certainly fear and I need to come to grips with that.
I think it is a transformative experience and I think like becoming quadriplegic, it needs to be grappled with and the solution to the extent that I have one, it relates to the Buddhist point about suffering, namely a certain kind of attachment is what causes suffering.
And what I I've been thinking about it a lot actually and I guess I hope when the time comes and I don't expect it to be for a while, but you never know.
Kind of hoping I've got, you know, pretty good chunk of time, but you have to reset yourself.
You have to change who you are in a certain way and find other sources of enjoyment.
And I don't mean something like sour grapes or adaptive reasoning.
I think you actually have to reconfigure like what you care about.
And that is in a sense like what the Buddhist teaching suggests.
In other words, you detach yourself from some of the kind of passions of of regular life and in virtue of detaching yourself then you truly actually change your preference structure.
It's not that you secretly still want them and if you could get them, you would, right?
That's adaptive in various ways.
It's rather that you reconfigure what you care about.
And I hope that if and when I experience cognitive decline, that I'll learn how to make sure I retain the most basic things that I value like joy in in art and in music.
Just expe- like being a consumer of of music and art and really good food.
And I want to try to treat that as a You see how I'm describing it as permission to like let go of things that I value, but cause me stress.
Like, you know, what causes stress and anxiety?
Like obligations, things like things that I need to do, accomplishments I want to kind of get to, right?
When that's inaccessible, like permanently gone, I want to be able to return to other basic sources of like happiness and pleasure, love with like loving my children and, you know, having friends, even if they're just everybody else in the assisted living facility or whatever, right?
I think it was a big senior dorm.
Like back in college, only a bunch of people who in their 80s and 90s.
And I want to be able to like understand how to reconfigure myself to enjoy that.
I've decided that is my task.
I'm not sure I'm there yet, but that's how I'm thinking about it.
And I think I want to I'm you want to write about this a little bit, but I don't see people approaching the issue in this way at all.
Yeah, I think it would be incredibly valuable for a lot of people for you to write about that and to explore that.
Laurie, thank you so much for the time.
People can find you and all things LA Paul LAPaul.
org and certainly we'll link to all of the books and everything else in the show notes.
Is there anything else you would like to say to my audience, anywhere else you would like to point them, anything at all that you'd like to add before we land the plane? Well, two things.
One is I do have a book that's coming out.
It's not It's going to be ages.
It's going to be like two more years, but a lot of the themes that we've been talking about are going to come back and and it's going to be written for non-philosophers.
So, I hope that it'll be the kind of thing that people would would turn to if they want to get a sense of some of some of these discussions.
And no, just I understand that philosophers are weird and that we do weird things and that we can be kind of annoying.
Maybe I just want people to like forgive us for that.
We're sometimes not very good at at representing ourselves, but I think in general it's a worthwhile activity for people who have a taste for it.
And even if you don't, it's kind of worthwhile to think about some of these questions sometimes and yeah, so maybe I'm asking for a little bit of indulgence and patience. And curiosity, folks.
I mean, there are toolkits and even if you can't get to really definitive, satisfying answers, there are a lot of good questions worth asking also.
And in and of themselves, maybe like a koan, they can lead interesting places. Exactly.
So, Laurie, thank you for the time and thank you for your work.
Really, really appreciate it.
And for everybody listening, we will put everything in the show notes as per usual at teamdabblog/podcast.
And until next time, be just a bit nicer than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.